Why Reddit is pivoting from social platform to ‘go-to search engine,’ with COO Jennifer Wong

Back in April, the social media platform released Reddit Answers, an AI-powered search functionality based on Reddit community answers. Eyeing the road ahead, Reddit has plans to unify its core search and Reddit answers into a single search experience “sooner rather than later,” said Jennifer Wong, Reddit’s chief operating officer, flicking at a potential roll out this year, but without revealing exact timelines. 

“Over the last 18 to 24 months, we’ve really worked hard on developing those hard marketing outcomes that make every impression work harder — especially at the mid and lower funnel,” Wong said on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “Search is in line with that.”

Also on this episode, inside the streaming service reshuffling (and what it means for streaming’s value proposition), and what the Omnicom-IPG merger U.K. go ahead says about the new era for agency hold cos. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Social media platform to search go-to

What happened is that as our corpus has gotten bigger over time — all the posts, the conversations, the votes, the comments [are] well-ranked, well-organized, and because we’ve been open — we’re believers of the open web, and we’ve been beneficiaries of that. All of that information has been accessible in search. What happened probably in the last eight to 10 years is that that corpus of human conversation intelligence has become increasingly appreciated by search, because it’s so helpful to people, because it’s real, authentic experience. What’s happened is that we then started getting more traffic from search, and fast forward to the last couple of years over the last 12 to 18 months, where Reddit became the sixth most searched term in Google in the U.S. in the last year.

Two, the search experience on Reddit was not meeting their needs yet. And so search became elevated as a priority for us, because we believe that we should be the best at searching Reddit.

Unifying search on Reddit

Reddit answers is a prototype. It’s 6 million weekly actives. The search activity in the search bar across Reddit is 70 million weekly. Bringing those experiences together is the first port of call — just having it be cohesive. Then the second is taking that experience and threading it throughout Reddit — having search be part of your core community use case of how you navigate and learn more and navigate through Reddit. That’s the second thing you’ll see — is this weaving that throughout our own product.

Search ads roadmap

All of the work we’ve done in contextual relevance for our ads, particularly in the conversation placements and the ads and comments, that will be a helpful capability in search. I don’t know what it’ll ultimately look like, and it will take time because we want the product to settle. But our capabilities are well aligned with where that would go.